Port UI

In Naval Action, port is your workshop. The open sea is for sailing, fighting and running missions; almost everything else — buying and selling, fitting out ships, crafting, taking quests, storing your goods — happens while docked. That makes the port screen the busiest interface in the game, but it’s easier to read once you see how it’s organised: the screens fall into things that affect all your ships and goods, things that affect your current main ship, and your personal captain details. This page is a tour of those screens and what each is for; the deeper economy and crafting strategy lives in its own sections.

How the port menu is organized

Think of the docked menu in three groups. Port activities are the wide-reaching screens — your fleet of owned ships, your storage, the markets, crafting, quests and outposts. Main-ship controls are a smaller set that act only on the ship you’re currently sailing — its equipment, crew and hold. And your captain’s details — rank and fortune, your DLC, flags and perks — round it out. Keep that split in mind and the menu stops feeling random: if it touches every ship, it’s a port activity; if it touches only the one ship you’re steering, it’s a main-ship control.

Navy: your ships and docks

The Navy screen lists every ship you own, across every port — it’s your whole fleet on one screen. Right-click a ship that’s in the port you’re standing in and you can set it as your main ship, tow it to another of your outposts, send it out as a fleet ship, return a fleet ship to the docks, or sell it directly to another player. Ships docked in a port other than the one you’re in are visible but can’t be acted on until you’re there or tow them in. There’s a limit to how many ships you can keep in your docks; you can buy additional dock slots — up to a roster cap of 25 as of the 2026 build, with each new slot costing more doubloons than the last — and certain DLC adds more.

Warehouse

The Warehouse is your storage: equipment, materials, trade goods, upgrades, books and coin all live here. The catch is that it’s tied to having an outpost — in a port where you have one, your stored goods persist; in a port where you don’t, anything you leave behind is lost when you sail away (the game warns you first). Trading runs through the warehouse too: goods you sell are pulled from it, and goods you buy are deposited into it. You can drag and split stacks between the warehouse and any of your ships’ holds, and the screen will sort and consolidate loose stacks for you. Warehouse capacity itself can be expanded with doubloons when you outgrow it.

Shop

The Shop is the port’s market, all in reals. Here you buy and sell cannons, upgrades, consumables (repairs, medicine, ammunition), resources and books. Beyond buying off the shelf, you can place contracts: a buy contract that waits for goods at the price you set, or a sell contract that offers your goods to the market. Contracts cost a non-refundable tax up front, lock the relevant money or goods while they stand, and expire after a few days; you claim back whatever was filled (and anything unfilled is returned). How many contracts you can run grows with your rank. The mechanics of working the market for profit are in Trading & Contracts.

Buying & selling ships

The Auction is the player-to-player ship market. Ships are filtered by the rank needed to sail them, and by type and port; hover a listing to inspect what you’re really buying — its build woods and trim, its upgrade slots, and anything already fitted. To sell, list a ship and set a price; a tax is paid up front and isn’t recoverable, the ship sits on the market for a few days, and the game mails you when it sells, naming the buyer. Ships you crafted yourself are exempt from that listing fee (see Acquiring a Ship). To buy, the displayed price includes tax, and the ship is delivered to you with an empty hold and no cannons — budget for fitting it out. This is one of three ways to sell a ship; the other two are a direct player sale from the Navy screen and an instant fixed-price sale to the Admiralty.

The Admiralty

The Admiralty looks like another shop but trades in doubloons, not reals, and deals in the special end of the catalogue: particular pieces of equipment, upgrades or blueprints, unique items you can’t craft (such as fisher planking), national flags for roughly 25,000 doubloons apiece, and Loki runes. The currency is the quick tell — if a counter wants doubloons, you’re at the Admiralty; if it wants reals, you’re at the Shop. Conquest flags also pass through here, but that is an RvR concern picked up in Port Battles.

Buildings

From the port screen you put up the buildings that anchor your production: a workshop for consumables and components, a forge for cannons, a shipyard for ships. Each building unlocks the crafting it enables — you can’t lay down a hull without a shipyard, or cast cannons without a forge — and well-chosen production feeds the economy, since some of what you make sells for a good margin. This guide keeps the port-screen description here and leaves what each building costs to Buildings, and the recipes, woods and build detail to Ship Crafting.

Outpost management

An outpost is your foothold in a port: it’s what makes the docks and warehouse there permanent, and it’s the anchor of your travel network — you can teleport yourself between your outposts for a fee that scales with distance. You can hold several outposts at once, in friendly ports and free towns, opening each for a one-time slot tax that rises as you add more. Closing an outpost has rules worth respecting: it costs a removal fee, you generally need to clear out any ships beyond your main and fleet ships first (tow, sell or sail them elsewhere), or you’ll lose them, and any goods still in that warehouse are forfeit when you leave. The economy-side detail is in Outposts & Warehouses.

Journal

The Journal and Port Quests buttons sit along the bottom of the port screen. Port Quests is your gateway to missions, operations and events — you pick up work here — broadly, cargo-delivery quests, combat quests, and port-attack quests that feed the conquest game — and completing it pays out in reals, doubloons, experience or special chests. The Journal tracks what you’ve taken and finished; you can read it at sea, but taking, cancelling or claiming missions happens in port. The open-ended missions themselves are covered in Delivery & Hunt Missions.

Reward chest

Rewards for completed work are deposited into your Reward Chest, which you open and empty at one of your outposts. Its contents persist until you claim them, so there’s no rush — though some rewards are heavy cargo, so leave hold space when you go to collect. Together with the Journal it closes the loop: take a mission in port, run it at sea, then collect your payout from the chest back in port. How the chest fits alongside Loki runes and the journal is in Loki Chests & Journal.

Equipment, crew & hold

The last group acts only on your current main ship, and its buttons sit in the middle of the port screen. Equipment is where you fit it out: view its characteristics, add or swap cannons deck by deck, install upgrades and ship knowledge, and apply paint if you own the relevant DLC. One distinction is worth remembering — knowledge can be removed and reused on another ship, but upgrades are permanent: to change one you destroy it, and it’s gone. Crew handles your complement, and Hold manages this ship’s cargo — the same hold screen you use at sea, where you check capacity, fix overloads and shift goods between ships. What to actually put on a ship — which woods, books, mods and perks — is in Mods, Books & Perks.